12.28.2011
Thoughts on The Little Mermaid
think of ariel, the mermaid, after she has become human. think of her holding the prince, after the shipwreck, in the middle of the broken ship's debris. what did she learn about the ocean, when she realized it would drown her? none of its features will have changed, but its relation to her becomes something foreign and deadly, something unknown. really, she doesn't learn anything new about the ocean. she comes to know it as something new. even where no new information is gained, one can further grasp things.
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What do you call that non-informational content that Areil acquires?
Well, I'm not confident I want to say that her "gaining knowledge" constitutes some acquisition of content. The non-informational character of her knowledge would be, I think, in its not being content-oriented. We may be able to construe her knowledge in terms of content gained, but this would be to dispute the point as originally put. I'm fine doing that. Maybe I should. She is acquainted with lots of the ocean's qualitative and intrinsic properties by relating to it in a particular way, as a natural environment. As a human she later encounters those same properties from a different perspective. Isn't her realization of some new content: the relation she now bears to the ocean? Or that it bears to her? She would say "oh! the ocean can do _that_ to _me_." That moral isn't very deep: a thing's intrinsic properties underdetermine its extrinsic properties.
At any rate, the notion I meant to dwell on was something like: grasping an object or a phenomenon demands more than counting or detailing its features. It demands approaching it from various perspectives, handling it under various conceptualizations. Of course I've left the notion of "grasping" unhelpfully wishy-washy.
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